If you think students spend all their spare time avoiding studying, going out with their mates and having a good time then you'd be right. Well our student bloggers do anyway. While they assure us they don't slack on the study, they've got a lot to answer for when it comes to enjoying themselves while volunteering.

All | Emma | Olivia | Fiona | Sammy | Ashley | Rochelle | Tom | TomG | Harry

Friday Dec 05, 2008

Chinatown....

Sorry it's been a while – luckily I can blame it on my new job, which annoyingly means I have less time to volunteer, and the cold, which makes me type really slowly...!

As the weeks have gone by in Marie Curie I got to grips with the demon till and unleashed a plague of incorrect change and incoherent beepings upon the unsuspecting customers. Add to this the fact that the steamer, which we use to make sure everything is pressed and beautiful before it goes on the shop floor was making the lights fuse and the customers flee for daylight and an idea of the weekly mayhem starts to emerge!

Finally, just as things started to quiet down, I slid a box of patterned china plates off the desk.... Seeming to fall in slow motion, the fragmented pieces of white china covered in curling yellow daffodils cascaded to the floor in an avalanche and swept from the till to the window display at the far end of the shop. For a long moment everything was silent – customers turned round, I looked at the mess and the customers looked at me. I was totally frozen in embarrassed horror but just as I was wishing the floor would open and swallow me a voice behind me said, 'We'll have to think of a nickname for you now' and everybody started to laugh.

Suddenly there was a long queue at the till and everyone was sympathising and making jokes and teasing. The china was marked from a 30 piece set to a 22 and the day went on, broken plates being rapidly overshadowed by the memories of another volunteer who told us how when in her twenties, she and her friends had travelled across the country by train every time a ship came in and spent the day going about with the sailors!! Now in her seventies and dosed on steroids (or 'stair-rods' as one regular calls them), her tales of how her grandmother had greeted her boyfriends by looking at the label inside their coat had us all doubled up, helpless with laughter.

If you want to look at volunteering in a local Marie Curie shop in your area have a look at the website, which has vacancies for fundraising, admin and other kinds of volunteering too.

Posted by Olivia ( 3:00 PM )
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Tuesday Nov 04, 2008

Tea and giggles

Hi! I’m Olivia, I live in Belfast and I volunteer in a Marie Curie Charity Shop, which is the centre of the local community. Some people come in once and never again and some come in every day wanting a red handbag or a cut glass bowl; asking if things would suit Jenny or Sarah, when none of us knows who Jenny or Sarah is!

On my first shift an elderly volunteer with misty blue eyes, lowered her cup of tea and exclaimed to the assembled company – ‘The only reason people volunteer in this shop is because they have nothing better to do!’ There was a moment of stunned and awkward silence as everyone turned to glance nervously in my direction in case I felt in some way insulted and in an instant we were all helpless with laughter, shaking our mugs of tea and slopping the contents! There was the new girl (me) at 21, the manager, in her forties, a regular leaning against the doorway between the shop and the back room, in her sixties and the straight talker, in her seventies, all roaring with laughter in the little room filled with bags of clothes and boxes of china, books and Barbie dolls.

Later, that lady would receive her five-year badge in a little ceremony of presentation and flowers and she had been working there for five years for the same reasons that saw us all there on a Saturday morning - because we all want to raise money for the extraordinary work of Marie Curie Cancer Care in their hospices, in providing free nursing care to allow people the choice to spend their last moments at home, and in carrying out research to improve care and treatment for patients. We were there because there are few people today who have not known someone affected by cancer and because we all want even in a small way, for a few hours a week, to stand alongside the doctors and nurses, the scientists, the administrators and managers, as part of this organisation and its work.

But what kept us there was exactly those hysterical moments; the banter and the craic. Even my disastrous first encounters with the demon till were greeted with laughter and sympathy in equal measure! One member of staff, formerly in the army, said that she avoided it at all costs, which explains why when she, finding herself the only one on the shop-floor with a queue forming shouts ‘TILL!’ at the top her voice, which makes everyone else giggle until they reach her and then loudly declare their intention of killing her – regularly bringing down the house.

The charity shop is not only a miniature production line in which clothes come in, are sorted, hung, steamed, priced, displayed, sold, culled, but a permanent car boot sale, an antiques store, a meeting place, a treasure trove, a comedy show, an agony aunt, and a community lifeline for people alone. It is always filled with characters, with drama and incident; where the joys and sorrows of multiple lives are played out to laughter, (elbows on a counter covered in glass bowls and tea sets) over cream buns and mugs of tea.

More soon…..

Olivia x

Posted by Olivia ( 4:59 PM )
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